


You Left Me in the Dark

by thecryoftheseagulls



Series: Damla Adaar [1]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Dragon Age: Inquisition Spoilers, F/M, Sad Ending, Thom Rainier reveal and consequences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 06:46:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3110015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecryoftheseagulls/pseuds/thecryoftheseagulls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ficlet dealing with Damla Adaar’s feelings on the reveal of Blackwall’s true identity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Left Me in the Dark

When Damla Adaar wakes, it’s the itchiness she notices first, straw poking her in the back, the scent of horse and hart heavy in the air. The second is the cold. She stretches out a hand to the space on the blanket beside her and finds only emptiness. Her naked skin prickles against the chill mountain air whistling through the open stable, no warm body at her side to fend it off. Damla sits up.

"Blackwall?" It’s impossible for her voice to echo in all this open air, but even still, the plaintive notes of her call seem to linger before fading, as though her lover’s defection won’t be made real while the silence is held at bay.

It’s nothing new, waking up alone, the dawn finding empty space beside her where in the night was a body. Her lovers always leave her – if not at first, then eventually. But Blackwall is the first who may actually mean something to Damla. Certainly the first to call her ‘lady’ without guile, and where normally she would laugh at the term applied to herself, from his lips she craves it. So she goes after him.

But the man she has begun to cautiously care for is a man of principles, integrity, a man who looks at Damla and sees something honorable. Blackwall is a man whose will is strong enough to overcome Corypheus’ call, a man decorated for valor. He smells like straw and wood and earth, stands guard loyal at her side as she casts shards of ice at their enemies. He is a sturdy Marcher like herself, a Warden.

The man they call Thom Rainier is none of these things, not one. He is a poncy Orlesian, a liar, a murderer, a coward. Murder she could countenance, murder for pay perhaps more so, but murder of children? And to abandon his men to their deaths – innocent of everything but following his orders – that is what chills her to the bone. Damla has a very simple code, but loyalty she prizes more deeply than her life.

She saves him from execution. She’s not quite sure why. When they bring Rainier before her in Skyhold, the sight of him bound, bowed, once proud eyes on the floor hurts her. But she does not go to him. She is the Inquisitor now and her responsibility is to judge fairly.

His first comment is on her reputation, this blight to the honor he thinks she is made of. He says, “What happens to the reputation the ambassador has so carefully cultivated? The world will learn how you’ve used your influence. They’ll know the Inquisition is corrupt.”

“That’s no longer your concern,” she says, and that is all she says, because she is the Inquisition, she is Temperance, Justice, a leader on a throne, not just a woman with a splintered heart.

But what she would have said, what she wishes to say, is, “Did you ever really know me at all? Or did you just see me as your redemption, an object on which to pin all your hopes of being a better man? I’m not honorable or particularly good, and I’m certainly not a lady. Oh, I wanted to be for you, because you were so good and steadfast under all that regret I thought was misplaced. But you’re just a hypocrite, aren’t you? You were never anything you pretended to be. You never saw me, you just saw what you wanted to see, projected a woman who could save you from yourself on a hired mercenary just naïve enough to fall for it. Fuck you, Blackwall. You’re no different from any of the others who wanted me for my horns or the pride of calling me a conquest, no better than all the rest with their preconceived notions of who I am. And all this time I thought you weren’t the same.”

She sentences him to be given to the Wardens when the war is over. His deception was mainly against them, and she knows Alistair will judge him fairly. It seems only right that he take on the taint he has pretended to hold for so long. The slow, halting steps he takes toward her after the sentence is passed only serve to cut at her more deeply. But when he says, “I lied about who I was, but I never lied about what I felt,” she cuts him off with a raised hand. 

“It’s over, Rainier,” she says, and the name sits wrongly on her tongue, tastes like the ashes of all her hopes. She leaves the throne room without a backward glance before her soldiers have even taken him away.


End file.
